Fellow editing blogger Craig Lancaster at Watch Yer Language recently took note of a column by James Kilpatrick. The topic of the column was “that” versus “which.” The didactic Kilpatrick expresses his disdain for “which.”

I liked Craig’s measured response to Kilpatrick, in which he diagnosed a blend of tact and grammar in working with writers who struggle with this problem. I also like this advice on “which” from After Deadline, a blog by a deputy news editor at The New York Times.

Kilpatrick is wrong to throw out “which” altogether. After all, it’s not that complicated to determine which is correct.

“The Office” has global appeal, even though most of us have never worked for “a regional paper and office supply distributor,” as the fictional company Dunder Mifflin describes itself. The petty politics, misguided management and odd personalities depicted on the show ring true at any kind of company or business.

Newsrooms are offices, and they are similar to the one portrayed in “The Office.” Many newsrooms are laid out like the office on the show, with the staff clustered in groups of desks and management peering out from glassed-in offices. Indeed, as I watch the U.S. version of “The Office” every week, I occasionally have flashbacks to my newsroom experiences. Others have made the same connection.

So what would the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin look like if it suddenly gave up office supplies and took up journalism? Here’s a possible newsroom reorganization for The Dunder Mifflin Times.

A recent letter to the editor in The News & Observer discussed an incident at N.C. State University. Four students painted racist messages about Barack Obama in the Free Expression Tunnel on campus, setting off a debate over the limits of the First Amendment.

Here’s what the “nut graf” of the letter says:

I cherish the First Amendment as much as anyone and more than many. But in some cases, speech can and does equal shouting fire in a crowded theater. In those cases, institutional restraints may be justified.

Actually, the Constitution protects the right of someone who yells fire in a crowded theater, provided that there is indeed a fire. That’s the distinction the Supreme Court made in 1919. As Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.

The key word here is “falsely.” Yes, the word is often dropped when people quote Holmes. But it’s an important distinction and a piece of legal history that should be quoted accurately.

The “by the numbers” story form is sometimes criticized for divorcing those numbers from their context. This is indeed a hazard of this technique, but the key is recognizing that hazard, not dumping the “by the numbers” idea altogether.

This example from the Web site of the Los Angeles Times shows us how to this well. The “by the numbers” box on the homepage shows the vital statistics related to the recent wildfires in Southern California. It is a story that is both important and incremental. The box summarizes the story well, and having it online rather than in print allows for frequent updating. It’s another piece of the story along with the slideshow, the news story and the opinion piece. One thing that could be improved is the color; the grey numbers are a little hard to read.

So yes, be careful with those numbers-based textboxes. Don’t make the numbers BIG in the design when they don’t need to be, and make sure the reader can connect the numbers to their larger meaning. But don’t count out the “by the numbers” idea when the content works.